Web Crawler in SEO – Definition and Working

SEO crawler, commonly referred to as a web spider or web bot or web crawler, uses a set of guidelines and algorithms to choose which internet pages to scan. Choosing which pages to crawl is sometimes referred to as “URL selection” or “URL prioritization.”

How do Web Crawlers in SEO Works?

The following are some of the crucial elements and techniques that web spiders consider while making this choice:

1. Seed URLs

SEO crawlers begin by using a list of seed URLs that their operators supply. The crawl will normally start at these seed URLs, and the crawler will first fetch and examine the content of these sites.

2. Robots.txt

SEO crawlers check the `robots.txt` file of a website before crawling it. The `robots.txt` file contains instructions from the website owner about which parts of the site should not be crawled. The crawler will respect these rules and avoid crawling disallowed pages.

3. Domain and Subdomain Prioritization

SEO Crawlers frequently give priority to certain domains or subdomains when crawling websites. In contrast to lesser-known or lower-quality domains, high-quality and authoritative domains may be crawled more frequently.

4. Page Freshness

Some SEO crawlers give pages that have recently changed or updated priority. To decide which pages to crawl more regularly, they may utilize signals like the time since the previous alteration or the frequency of updates.

5. Page Importance

SEO crawlers assess the importance of a page based on factors like its inbound and outbound links, page authority, and relevance to specific topics or keywords. Important pages are crawled more often.

6. Page Depth

Both a depth-first and a breadth-first strategy can be used by SEO crawlers. Prior to moving on to other websites, depth-first crawlers give priority to pages that are further down in the website’s hierarchy. SEO Crawlers that focus on breadth attempt to visit a variety of pages on various websites.

7. URL Discovery

When SEO crawlers explore connections from previously inspected sites, they frequently discover new URLs to crawl. In order to find URLs, they can also employ sitemaps that website owners supply.

8. URL Queuing and Prioritization

SEO Crawlers keep a list of URLs they want to visit. Based on the aforementioned criteria, including significance, freshness, and relevancy, they prioritize URLs. URLs with a high priority are crawled first.

9. Recrawling

At regular intervals, SEO crawlers return to previously crawled pages to look for changes. Depending on variables like page significance and update frequency, recrawling frequency may change.

10. Politeness

In order to prevent flooding websites with requests, SEO crawlers often adhere to a set of courtesy guidelines. To be considerate of a website’s resources, they could add delays between requests and restrict the amount of queries made per second.

Note: In order to efficiently search and index web content while adhering to the guidelines and resource constraints of website owners, SEO crawlers continuously alter and enhance their crawling strategies. Different SEO crawling algorithms and criteria may be used by different crawling efforts and organizations.

FAQs related to Web Crawler

1. What is crawling in SEO?

Crawling is the discovery process in which search engines send out a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) to find newly updated content. 

2. How do websites detect SEO crawlers?

Websites can detect SEO crawlers using varieties of technique like SEO crawlers includes a “User-Agent” string in its HTTP request headers. This string identifies the SEO crawler or bot, Websites can use a file called “robots.txt” to specify which parts of their site should be crawled and indexed by SEO crawlers and which should be excluded, IP address identification, Reverse DNS lookup, JavaScript checks etc.

3. What is an example of a SEO crawler?

Every Search Engine use their own bots like Google use google bot, Microsoft Bing use Bingbot, Yandex a popular search engine of Russia use Yandexbot , Baidu a popular search engine of china use Baidu Spider.